Global Diary: Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s iconic skyscrapers, some as high as 88 stories, pull the eye heavenward, but at ground level, the city’s commercial district looks like a video stuck on fast-forward. Herds of smartly dressed professionals sprint in and out of huge shopping malls. Colorful double-decker buses blare their horns. And everywhere, something is for sale: A roasted duck hangs in a window that also advertises giant sausages. Next door, someone’s offering reflexology massage, underwear and mandarin jackets.

This packed city is an assault on the senses, yet Anson Chan, the woman I’ve come here to see, sits next to me in her big Mercedes-Benz, completely tranquil. Displaying perfect posture and impeccable style, one of the best-known women in Hong Kong surveys her city with the poise of a queen, a dimpled smile softening her aristocratic demeanor.

Anson, 67, was the highest-ranking woman ever to serve in Hong Kong’s government, and arguably its most popular. Until she retired in 2001, she was the city’s chief secretary for administration—its second highest position—and oversaw 190,000 government workers. During her 39-year career as a public servant, she gained a reputation for fairness and incorruptibility, and early in her career even fought for and won equal pay for women in civil service jobs. (“We have proved there is nothing a woman can’t do,” she says.) Now Anson is leveraging her celebrity to take on the most ambitious work of her life: a campaign for voting rights that has enhanced her reputation as “the conscience of Hong Kong.” For this seventh stop on my round-the-world journey for Glamour, I wanted to meet the woman who is asking a very dangerous political question: Will communist China, which rules Hong Kong, allow democracy here?

“I don’t believe democracy solves everything, but so far no one has dreamt up a better system,” Anson tells me, echoing a famous Winston Churchill quote. That’s why, in December 2005, Anson emerged from retirement to march with 250,000 demonstrators demanding universal suffrage in Hong Kong. Last summer she took to the airwaves in a series of radio broadcasts to personally call on residents to join her in another rally—and tens of thousands did. No wonder then that everywhere I go with Anson, people stare and wave and ask to shake her hand, offering support and opinions. “I don’t have the monopoly on wisdom,” she tells me. “A true leader should learn how to listen.”

On a map, Hong Kong looks like a mere dot in the South China Sea compared with the gigantic Chinese mainland to the north of it. But this metropolis of 7 million people is a thriving center for global finance and trade. It also has a unique history: In 1997, Hong Kong changed nationality overnight. Once a British colony, for the last decade it has been ruled by China under a special arrangement known as “one country, two systems.” Although the city is much more open than the rest of China—there’s little censorship, and dissidents are not jailed—Hongkongers, as they call themselves, cannot elect their top officials and fear that eventually Beijing will take away all their freedoms. And while Hong Kong’s constitution states that residents will someday have complete voting rights, no one knows when Beijing will allow that to happen—if ever.

One cloudy morning I walk through the campus of Hong Kong University, where Anson studied English literature nearly 50 years ago. I am moved to see a statue entitled “The Pillar of Shame,” honoring the many antigovernment demonstrators killed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. That a monument to victims of Chinese oppression could even exist here is a testament to Hong Kong’s relative freedom of expression—and a reminder of what Anson is fighting to preserve.

Challenging the Chinese government requires considerable bravery, given its notorious intolerance for those who oppose its views. I ask Anson, a mother of two and a grandmother of four, whether she’s concerned that her outspokenness could bring her trouble. “My relationship with Beijing is up-and-down,” she says, laughing. “They can’t figure me out.” Her style is nonconfrontational, but she is also determined to speak the truth. “China,” she says, “is dragging its feet on the way to democracy.”

Last fall you could almost hear the sighs of disappointment across Hong Kong as Anson announced she would not run for chief executive, the city’s highest position, in elections to be held this month. But Anson says that although residents will cast votes for some of their legislators (the rest are selected by special groups), the chief executive is actually chosen by a slate of electors controlled by Beijing; the election’s outcome is predetermined—and it wouldn’t have been in her favor. So instead of making a futile run for office, Anson formed a group of highly respected community members and former government officials to put together a proposal calling for universal suffrage. Perhaps no one but Anson, the consummate government insider with first-class political skills, can persuade China to sign on. “I want to create a pragmatic solution that stands at least half a chance of being accepted by Beijing,” she says.

Anson’s strength to take on such a challenge comes from other strong women in her life. She was born in Shanghai in 1940 to a prominent family. Her father, a textile manufacturer, moved the household to Hong Kong in 1948, one year before China fell to communism. Just two years later, her father died, leaving behind his wife and eight children, including 10-year-old Anson and her twin sister. Anson’s mother, Fang Zhaoling, became a successful painter and calligrapher; by the time she died last year at 92, she was one of China’s most celebrated modern artists. “My mother,” says Anson, “was a Renaissance woman, way ahead of her time. For a young widow of her generation to carve out such a career for herself was remarkable.” Anson was also deeply influenced—and partly raised—by her paternal grandmother, an illiterate woman who hobbled about on bound feet, one of imperial China’s painful traditions for women. “My grandmother was strict and very strong willed,” Anson says. “She is the one who taught me to be upright.”

Like any public figure, Anson has her critics. They harp on her well-to-do background and wonder how she can relate to ordinary people when she has never suffered poverty or hunger. So I take a walk in a housing project in the urban Kowloon section to see for myself what people have to say. I find sad, run-down buildings but a lively street life. Old men sitting on the sidewalks play mah-jongg, a gambling game, as little boys run after a soccer ball. I meet a young accounting student named Nathalie and ask for her thoughts on Anson Chan. “She is very strong, and people deeply feel for her and trust her,” Nathalie tells me. “She makes us feel we are in the hands of a competent, kind, yet strong leader.”

Nathalie’s boyfriend, Nelson, shows me his apartment, a jammed two-bedroom he shares with three family members. It’s depressing and claustrophobic, and I see how little living space there is for the average person in crowded Hong Kong. Nelson tells me that like many residents, he fears the Chinese government’s intentions. “No one knows what China plans for Hong Kong, but we hear about what happens to democracy fighters on the mainland and we are scared,” he says. “This is why Anson’s fearless stands and honesty are so precious to us.”

On my third day in Hong Kong, Anson takes me to her favorite market in the Victoria Peak neighborhood, where she lives with her husband of 43 years, Archie. She gives me a crash course in Chinese food shopping, introducing me to all kinds of exotic ingredients, like a black-skinned chicken used in soups and a hybrid between an apple and a pear that looks like neither one. Every few steps, we have to stop as groups of admirers gather to talk to Anson. “You do your own shopping?” one woman says, incredulous. Another yells out to her, “You should be chief executive!”

The people gathered at the market clearly love her and she responds patiently—posing for pictures and signing autographs. Anson is a true leader, and yet she doesn’t seem swayed by ego or cynicism—the two plagues of politics, as far as I’m concerned. How does she do it? “To resist being corrupted by power,” she says, “you need a strong moral compass. You need to know what matters and stick to it.”

As we depart the bustling market carrying the frozen lamb that Anson will cook for dinner that night, I share with her another impression from my trip: that anyone who stays in Hong Kong would have to live with a huge spectrum of fears, which includes crowds, the frantic pace, the heights, and last but not least, the specter of a Chinese crackdown. “Remember what Franklin D. Roosevelt said?” Anson asks me in her slightly regal way. “There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”